According to Chinese media outlets, NVIDIA is gearing to increases prices of its mid-range graphics cards, starting from July. The reasons for the price hike are two-fold. Firstly, the Chinese mid-year shopping festival of 6/18 has resulted in a shortage of mainstream GeForce GPUs forcing board partners to charge a premium for the dwindling local stock.
Secondly, crypto-miners have once again sprung into action, putting a strain on the global graphics card supply. Although the demand is nowhere as close to what we saw a few years back, it’s still substantial enough to drive the prices up by a notch.
At present, most RTX 20 series “Turing” graphics cards are selling at their respective MSRPs or a tad bit lower as retailers get rid of old stock to make way for the upcoming Ampere parts. However, this is expected to change as the production of Turing chips is phased out and supply slows down to a trickle.
The upcoming Ampere cards are certainly going to cost more than their Turing predecessors. However, for miners who don’t require the ray-tracing and AI (RT and tensors) cores, the GTX 16 series will be ideal, especially considering the attractive pricing. As such, the pricing of the GTX Turing cards should stay unchanged or even increase if there’s a shortage.
